Skinner, Martin

ORAL HISTORY OF MARTIN SKINNER
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 13, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is June the 13th, 2011, and I’m here in Oak Ridge at my studio with Mr. Martin Skinner. I appreciate you coming in to talk with us today.
Mr. Skinner: Glad to. I also like to talk about it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well Mr. Skinner tell me – just as a little bit of background – tell me about where you were born and raised.
Mr. Skinner: Well I was born just outside of Detroit, Michigan, and educated in high school there in a town called St. Clair Shores and then I went from there to Michigan State. When I was in Michigan State, Uncle Sam grabbed me and put me through the paces. I was lucky to get into their specialized engineering program and for about nine months was at LSU and then Washington University, St. Louis. They put me on a train and they dumped me off, and I didn’t know where I was but it turned out I was in Knoxville.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mr. Skinner: 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: 1944.
Mr. Skinner: I think the first week of September of ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were at – you said you went to Michigan?
Mr. Skinner: Michigan State, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Michigan State. Then they came and got you. How did that happen when they came to recruit you? Before you answer that question I want to make one quick change real quick and then I want you to answer that for me. [adjusting equipment] Too far. I can’t see. Okay, there we go. So what happened there?
Mr. Skinner: I came through at Michigan State and they said, “Sign up and enlist in the Reserve and stay in college.” Well, I stayed in college for three months and then I got my notice to report to active duty. I went to Chicago and then from there, I went to Sheppard Field, Texas, and there I saw this sign that said, “Sign up for additional education.” So all of us beat the path to do that and we hung around in Sheppard Field, Texas for – I don’t know – it seemed like forever. Suddenly we shipped out and ultimately I got in at LSU.
Mr. McDaniel: At LSU. What were they doing at LSU? Was that like a special training program?
Mr. Skinner: It’s regular engineering and some of the people were in mechanical engineering and some were electrical. Some of the people who had signed up for civil engineering never got there.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Skinner: They went directly to active duty. The mechanical engineers didn’t exist very long. They hauled them off to active duty. So chemical and electrical stayed there at LSU and I was there, as I say, about nine months. Then they moved me to Washington University, St. Louis, and I spent three months in the advanced – call it ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program]. Then here.
Mr. McDaniel: Did they – do you have a sense that they knew where they were going to send you? Did you have a sense that they knew what they wanted to do with you?
Mr. Skinner: I don’t think I did. It was one of these things that you just go along and they say, “Do this and do that,” and you do it. Like when I got to Knoxville, I don’t even think I knew that I was in Knoxville. I was at the L&N Station and they put us in covered trucks and hauled us out. The first thing we saw, then, is the orderly room here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? So when you came to Oak Ridge, you were in the service.
Mr. Skinner: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: You were a member of the SED, Special Engineering Detachment.
Mr. Skinner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: But when you were in college in Michigan, were you studying engineering, chemical engineering?
Mr. Skinner: I was studying Chem. Engineering at Michigan State and then after – I need to back up. When I was at LSU, Chem. Engineering wasn’t available. So I flipped the coin and took Electrical. By the time I got through with the courses there in St. Louis, I had enough courses then to switch over to Electrical when I went back to Michigan State in 1948.
Mr. McDaniel: So after your service, you went back to school?
Mr. Skinner: Right. I went back for about two years, got my degree, and then came back doing exactly the same job I’d been doing in the Army.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you came to Oak Ridge in ’44.
Mr. Skinner: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s right. That’s when you arrived in Oak Ridge. You hadn’t finished your degree yet, but you had had all this specialized training in chemical engineering. So tell me about coming to Oak Ridge. You said you got on a covered truck from Knoxville to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Skinner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about that.
Mr. Skinner: Well it’s hard to sort of remember. That was a few years ago.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Sure.
Mr. Skinner: But I remember stopping along the way and obviously it was one of the gates. I don’t know whether it was Elza or Solway gate. Then we came on and unloaded here in Oak Ridge in the orderly room. I was assigned to a dormitory, a barracks type thing for a short time and then moved into one of the four person hutments that they had here. The four of us there were on shift work and we came and went.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did they keep the military, the SED, kind of grouped together?
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. They were all in one area. A few of them in a barracks type building and the rest of us in lots of these little hutments.
Mr. McDaniel: The hutments? Where was your hutment? Was it in Midtown area?
Mr. Skinner: Well it’s about where the shopping center is now.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, that midtown area?
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. They were row on row and they had a separate room for showers and bath and wooden sidewalks connecting all of them, like all of Oak Ridge had.
Mr. McDaniel: So the hutment community, they didn’t have the plumbing in them, did they? I mean, they didn’t have showers and baths in the hutment. It was kind of like a campground, where you had a central shower and bath building.
Mr. Skinner: That’s right. We had an oil burner, a kerosene burning stove in the middle of the hut which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. You got up in the morning and you went to work and came back and sacked out or went to the PX or played cards or whatever you wanted to do.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you first came to Oak Ridge and you were in the SED, where did you go to work?
Mr. Skinner: I went to work for Y-12. I was assigned to an electrical crew in Beta-1, 9204-1, with another GI.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do?
Mr. Skinner: We did the maintenance work on all the electrical equipment associated with the separators. There are umpteen different voltages that are involved. So all the equipment is in cubicle form. That’s why we call it cubicle. It was our job to keep those things running. If you needed a new tube we’d put a new tube in or something, whatever, and get it back running as quickly as possible.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you say you were in Beta-1?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were in Beta-1. That building’s no longer there anymore, is it?
Mr. Skinner: The building’s there but the –
Mr. McDaniel: The contents are gone.
Mr. Skinner: All the contents are out and it’s used for many other things.
Mr. McDaniel: Was it similar to – I’ve been in Beta-3, so I imagine it’s –
Mr. Skinner: They are identical as far as I can tell.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So there was a lot of electrical being done with those systems, weren’t there?
Mr. Skinner: Oh yeah I mean because that’s the whole thing. You’ve got to ionize a gas and you’ve got to accelerate the ions and it’s –
Mr. McDaniel: By my count, if you had – did you have two racetracks in each building?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So by my count that would be seventy-two different cubicles and calutrons, and neutrons.
Mr. Skinner: That’s right. They were set up in a control room oriented just like the units were out on the track.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly. What was the biggest – I mean obviously they were just running all the time and just going and going and going, so I guess there was a lot of maintenance to do, electrical maintenance.
Mr. Skinner: Oh yeah. I mean probably the largest part is a replacement of the tubes and the rectifier systems. The high voltage system, you see, was 45,000 to 55,000 volts DC, and those tubes, if you’ve seen them, are about three feet high.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly.
Mr. Skinner: They were quite a job to replace.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure.
Mr. Skinner: Others were smaller tubes but when they hollered that they were down, why, we were there to find out why and get it back again.
Mr. McDaniel: Just a quick question: have you been in the basement of Beta-3 in the last few years?
Mr. Skinner: I took that tour they took of Beta-3 about three years ago. I don’t know whether we got in the basement or not on that tour.
Mr. McDaniel: See, about five or six years ago, I went in and shot some video in Beta-3. I think I was the first non-classified person ever to shoot video. I went downstairs to the basement. They still have some of those tubes packed in packing material that says, “Shipped” – printed on the side of the package is “Clinton Engineer Works, February 1943.” But those were big tubes, tall tubes.
Mr. Skinner: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So could you do that by yourself or was that two-man job?
Mr. Skinner: Well there were two on the crew – we usually worked together. Some things you did, you know, one person could handle.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you did that. How long did you do that job?
Mr. Skinner: So early in ’46, as I recall, January, and they knew that the Army people were soon going to be discharged from the Army. They took us off active work like that and put us over getting the Alpha buildings in so-called standby.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, because they were shutting everything down.
Mr. Skinner: Which involved mainly painting conduit and all sorts of things it seemed at the time were silly, but we had a job.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So I imagine because of the work that you were doing over there, that you probably – you knew what was going on. Or did you?
Mr. Skinner: I didn’t know. Didn’t know.
Mr. McDaniel: Really? Didn’t know what those things were doing, huhn?
Mr. Skinner: I think the first time that we were – our particular group was informed was after the test bomb.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Skinner: Even though that was not uranium, I always thought it was. But I think it was then that our supervisors called us over and said, “Here’s what you guys here were doing.”
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about – and we’ll go back – I want to go back a little bit – but tell me about – were you in Oak Ridge when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima?
Mr. Skinner: I must have been. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: You must have been. Do you remember anything about that?
Mr. Skinner: Well just all the excitement, crowds and things like that.
Mr. McDaniel: So what was it like? I imagine you were single then when you were here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Skinner: Yep, I was single.
Mr. McDaniel: Some people said they had lots of activities to choose from and then some people told me, “Man, we just worked all the time.”
Mr. Skinner: Well when you’re working on shift work, the rotating shift, you just – the only time really you had too much is if you were on day shift or they had the evening. Dancing and a lot of people played poker and bridge. I had – one of my friends was quite a gambler, and he made himself a fair amount of money. He was pretty lucky at it or good at it. I don’t know which. He just did –
Mr. McDaniel: Right. You just found ways to spend your time. Did you – I know they had lots of sports teams and things such as that.
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. I played on a basketball team and we were called the Little Stinkers because we never could win a game.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] That’s funny. That is funny. Okay, so you left. You went back. You were discharged from the Army in, what did you say, ’46?
Mr. Skinner: ’46.
Mr. McDaniel: And you went back to Michigan.
Mr. Skinner: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: Michigan State, and you finished your bachelors. Is that right?
Mr. Skinner: And my masters.
Mr. McDaniel: And your masters there.
Mr. Skinner: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me what happened then.
Mr. Skinner: Well before I was discharged and right after they had put us on this standby crew, I heard that there was an opening over in the Isotope group which ultimately was the Stable Isotope group. A couple of us GIs went over and saw Chris Keim and said, “We’d like to work. We don’t like this other job.” So he gave us a job. Of course that made the military kind of unhappy that we went around them, but at that time it didn’t make any difference. So I had worked there in 9731 from about February until June. Then in June is when I left and went back to Michigan and got married and went back to school. When I came back, why, the best job I could get was coming back to work in 9731 again doing exactly the same things I had been doing.
Mr. McDaniel: What were you doing in 9731?
Mr. Skinner: Doing the design and building of the separators for each of the stable isotopes. Every element required a slightly different format, structure.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me ask you a question, because I don’t know this. Now, to separate those, did they use the calutrons for that separation?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So basically they used the calutrons but you had to kind of adjust things according to the specific element?
Mr. Skinner: That’s right because of the different weight and the different physical characteristic of them. When we did, for example, mercury, mercury vaporizes very easily. So we used dry ice to keep it cold. The transfer agent was ethyl alcohol and you can imagine what happened when they ordered thirty-five gallons of alcohol at Christmas time.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] I’m sure.
Mr. Skinner: But they got it. They got it. But that’s just one of the illustrations of how different things had to be designed for the different elements that were being processed.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did you stay with the stable isotope program for a while?
Mr. Skinner: I stayed until the end of – what was it – the end of 1950. They were having a budget crunch and Chris Keim came – called me in on a Monday morning. He said, “We have budget problems. We’ve made up two lists: a list of those people we cannot do without and you’re on the other list unfortunately. But we’ve got” –
Mr. McDaniel: Well, you were still young then, weren’t you, just starting out.
Mr. Skinner: Yeah, sure. But they said, “We’ve got an interview for you this afternoon.” So I interviewed to work in the Law Department doing patent work.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? That’s right.
Mr. Skinner: I hardly knew how to spell the word ‘patent,’ but they hired me anyway. I switched over doing that work for the rest of the time I worked in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? So from 1950 until –
Mr. Skinner: Till the end of 1980.
Mr. McDaniel: Until the end of 1980, you did patent work.
Mr. Skinner: I did patent work in the Law Department.
Mr. McDaniel: Was that for the whole Oak Ridge site or was it just for –
Mr. Skinner: I was assigned do to it for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had an office in each of the plants and I was at the ORNL Patent Office.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me a little bit about that work. You did it for thirty years and I’ll bet you saw all kinds of things. I guess it’s – the stories are famous for people who worked there. They’ll get a patent and get paid a dollar or something like that. So tell me about how all that worked.
Mr. Skinner: Well, my job was to find the new things that the scientists were doing that might be subject matter for patent work. I wrote what we called an Invention Disclosure. That went to the AEC, at that time, who evaluated and decided whether they did want or did not want to file a patent application. If they did, then I was the liaison between the inventor and the attorneys on the government side to do that. So it was a process of educating scientists who don’t want to be bothered with much of control and getting them educated, reading reports, looking to see if new things were being talked about. In fact, I had to read everything that was being published before it could go out.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Skinner: That got to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure.
Mr. Skinner: Finally I said, “I’ve had enough of that.” I’d had enough years of service. So I said, “I’m leaving,” so I did.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me see here. I have a couple of questions about that, but first, I guess you had – just off the top of my head, you would think that someone with a legal background would be a person that would be required for that position or was it somebody with a –
Mr. Skinner: No, it was really – to be a good patent person, you need to be a good technical person, because you have to understand and you have to try to extend the thoughts of the inventor to get patent coverage on things.
Mr. McDaniel: I see. So you needed to be kind of almost an advocate for the inventor as far as the technical aspect of it?
Mr. Skinner: Very much so.
Mr. McDaniel: So that – then obviously your technical expertise would have been required for that. What are some of the – are there any of the things that stand out in your mind that you worked on over those thirty years?
Mr. Skinner: Oh, that’s – you caught me off balance here. Well, one of them that became internationally known was a neutron dosimeter invented by Sam Hurst and it was called the Hurst Dosimeter. There was that that we got a patent on and a couple of the organic separation processes for recovering uranium and plutonium. Those are the ones that come to mind immediately.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But I’m sure there were probably hundreds of them that you did over the years.
Mr. Skinner: There were. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: For us lay people we’d probably think, “Well I don’t even understand what that means,” but for the scientific technical community, it may have been the biggest thing since sliced bread, couldn’t it? [laughter]
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. Some of the things in the metallurgical field, some of the new alloys that were developed that are now in use commercially: your ink alloys and some of the highly corrosive resistant –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you covered, really, all of the Lab, everything. All the biology, everything.
Mr. Skinner: Everything that was being done by people working for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you ever work with the Russells, Lee Russell?
Mr. Skinner: I didn’t because I guess there was never a thought of inventive concepts in their research. I know who they are, but I never had any contact with them.
Mr. McDaniel: So you did that until you retired in 1980. Is that correct?
Mr. Skinner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: We’re going to go back here and I’m going to talk about some things, but tell me, since you retired, what have you been doing?
Mr. Skinner: Well, I didn’t like retirement. In fact my wife said I flunked it. Among other things I didn’t know what day of the week it was, because you talk about the Monday-Friday syndrome, well, it really exists. On Friday you’re working to get through things, finished for the week, and on Monday you’re starting new things. But anyway, I had a chance to go to work for a firm in Knoxville to do patent work and so I took that job in – I guess it was probably March of April of 1980 and I continued working for them as an independent contractor till about 2005, I guess, or 2006 –
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Skinner: – doing patent work, writing patent applications. I did the patent applications on the first commercially useful pet sensor. They’re used in everything nowadays. I did the patent work on the 360 degree photography, the IPIX Technology, and lots of other things between. Pocket knives, fishing lures, meat processing equipment, just anything that came in the door.
Mr. McDaniel: So you did work in post-retirement almost as long as you did when you were working here.
Mr. Skinner: Yeah, I did.
Mr. McDaniel: So you’ve done patent work for fifty-five – you did it for fifty-five years, didn’t you?
Mr. Skinner: Very close to it.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. So let’s go back to Oak Ridge. When you came back after you got your Master’s degree, you were married at the time. Is that correct?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about bringing your wife. Did you have family by then?
Mr. Skinner: No.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you live and what kind of house did you get?
Mr. Skinner: One of the dormitory buildings out near Louisiana Avenue had been converted into sort of apartments. They had – so we got that and I got on the list for regular housing. I can’t remember how long we were there. It seems like two, three months, maybe longer. Then we got a house, a “B” house up at the top of California Avenue, the last house on California Avenue. We started raising a family. Our daughter was born when we were there and our oldest son was born while we were living in that house. About the time he was born, the house was so small, we didn’t want it. At that time they were offering the houses, the rental houses for sale and we didn’t want the house we were in. So we began to look around the communities and we ended up going to Kingston. My boss lived in Kingston. So he I guess was influential in getting me to go that way. So we moved to Roane County in ’52, I believe, 1952.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you move to the house that you’re still in?
Mr. Skinner: No. We moved on Nelson Drive on the lake; we had a house built for us. We lived in that house thirty-nine years and then we –
Mr. McDaniel: Was that out in Green Acres?
Mr. Skinner: No. It’s right in behind Mama Mia’s.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, that’s right.
Mr. Skinner: Now we’re out in West Shores in the midtown area on the lake. We’ve been in that house for I guess nineteen years now.
Mr. McDaniel: But you liked Kingston, huhn?
Mr. Skinner: We love the area very much.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So when you were in Oak Ridge or in Kingston what were some of the – when you were working at the plant, I guess, at the Lab, what were some of the extracurricular activities? Were you in civic groups or –
Mr. Skinner: Well I guess it was in ’53 or ’54 I joined the Lions Club in Kingston and I’ve been a member of the Kingston Lions Club ever since. I’ve always been active in my church, St. Stevens, in Oak Ridge, the men’s work there. Then in 1983, I guess it was, I helped form the Tennessee Inventors Association and it still exists and [is] active today. Those were the three principle things that I’ve been involved in.
Mr. McDaniel: Over your years at the Lab – of course, they’ve done all kinds of different things, I guess. What are some of the biggest changes you saw in maybe the kind of work that was going on there, because you really – you came and you did your job during the war here. You were in the Army and you came and did your job and helped Oak Ridge achieve its goal. Then you came back and really started your career after that. What were some of the big changes, some of the big things that you saw over the years?
Mr. Skinner: Well, I guess it was increase in management levels. When I first was over at the Lab, even people who were listed as department heads were active scientists and over the years it got more and more where – I shouldn’t call them figureheads – but became not active scientists.
Mr. McDaniel: They were managers.
Mr. Skinner: Managers. The more you have, the more complicated it gets and the slower things seemingly progress. I guess that’s my feeling. I’m sure that happens everywhere, but with a lab beginning from essentially nothing, it went through that phase. Mr. McDaniel: I bet the separating the stable isotopes was an exciting project.
Mr. Skinner: It was.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about that a little bit. For people that don’t understand what that would mean, explain that to us.
Mr. Skinner: There’s some fifty elements that have isotopes which is a same material but has different atomic weight.
Mr. McDaniel: Just like uranium does, U-238 and U-235.
Mr. Skinner: Right. That’s why we can separate them in the calutrons just like uranium. But they were doing some of these to use as tracers. Some of them, they irradiated to make radioactive substances that went into the medical field for – one that took us about over a year to develop, we enriched a sample of uranium-236 which doesn’t naturally occur at all. It exists after a material has been in the reactor. They asked us to make separation and concentrate some of that. It started off at less than one percent and we got it above twenty percent. But I think the quantity of the sample we had to begin with was – what was it? A few ounces – four ounces I think.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Skinner: An awful small amount for – so that we could get it all back as much as we could, we designed a half-scale calutron, twelve inch radius. Again, when you’ve changed everything like that, why, it changed all the other parameters. So you’d build it this way and it wouldn’t work and you’d build it again and you’d tear it down and the process lasted probably over a year. I guess that was maybe the most exciting of the processes that I worked on.
Mr. McDaniel: But the separation of the stable isotopes was really – I mean it did lots of things for science, but one of the main things it did was it was really the birthplace of nuclear medicine.
Mr. Skinner: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: Those isotopes were used in medicine, were beginning to be used in medicine weren’t they?
Mr. Skinner: You see, that building, which was the pilot plant for uranium, also became the pilot plant for isotope separation, a natural extension of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. You eventually separated all the elements. Is that correct?
Mr. Skinner: All that had an isotope, yeah. I think there are fifty-some. Some of them for a practical end use. Others just to say that you’d done it, so to speak.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. But I would imagine that that would have been an exciting – kind of knowing what you’re doing, it was really kind of on the forefront of science. I mean, it really was.
Mr. Skinner: There have been people who say that the stable isotope separation is probably on top of the list of value of the atomic field.
Mr. McDaniel: Well that’s like when I interviewed Alvin Weinberg before he passed away, I asked him, I said, “What’s the most important thing that you were ever part of?” And he says, “I think the most important thing we ever did at Oak Ridge was the nuclear medicine, was being able to separate those isotopes for nuclear medicine.”
Mr. Skinner: We were the only ones doing it. Subsequently, I believe, it seemed like the Russians undertook it.
Mr. McDaniel: The Russians undertook it and by that time it was becoming commercialized. So it really became a matter of supply and demand and cost, from my understanding. The Russians ended up being able to do it a whole lot cheaper than we could.
Mr. Skinner: I was out of that work by the time that that occurred, so I really don’t know much of the proceedings.
Mr. McDaniel: I talked with Scott Aaron about that and he was able to talk a little bit about that. What else do you want to talk about? Anything else you want to mention?
Mr. Skinner: Well, I may be repeating myself, but they talk about the whole project being the Manhattan Project. I consider the work in Y-12 the Miracle Project.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Skinner: Because they took just a few tests and I think it was a thirty-seven inch cyclotron, and from that built the units for 9731 and then ten process plants. That really took guts to – faith, I guess, is a better word. The way it came about, I think, is a real miracle.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Looking back on it now, how do you feel – I try to ask this to folks who worked during the project. I get varying answers. How do you feel about working here during the war and finding what the end product was?
Mr. Skinner: I’m proud as heck. I’ve talked to so many people who were on their way toward Japan and they say the bomb saved their life. They had been told that they likely would not come back. I’ve got a brother-in-law that bumped into all sorts of people. They were going through the Panama Canal or going halfway across the Pacific and turned around and came back home. There have been some people – I think there were some scientists who were maybe not convinced that we had to use it. I thoroughly am convinced they had to use it, and I’m happy that it worked out.
Mr. McDaniel: Well good. Is there anything else you want to talk about?
Mr. Skinner: Well I don’t know. I think we covered lots of things.
Mr. McDaniel: You got any good, funny stories?
Mr. Skinner: I’m not much of a –
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MARTIN SKINNER
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 13, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is June the 13th, 2011, and I’m here in Oak Ridge at my studio with Mr. Martin Skinner. I appreciate you coming in to talk with us today.
Mr. Skinner: Glad to. I also like to talk about it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well Mr. Skinner tell me – just as a little bit of background – tell me about where you were born and raised.
Mr. Skinner: Well I was born just outside of Detroit, Michigan, and educated in high school there in a town called St. Clair Shores and then I went from there to Michigan State. When I was in Michigan State, Uncle Sam grabbed me and put me through the paces. I was lucky to get into their specialized engineering program and for about nine months was at LSU and then Washington University, St. Louis. They put me on a train and they dumped me off, and I didn’t know where I was but it turned out I was in Knoxville.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mr. Skinner: 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: 1944.
Mr. Skinner: I think the first week of September of ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were at – you said you went to Michigan?
Mr. Skinner: Michigan State, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Michigan State. Then they came and got you. How did that happen when they came to recruit you? Before you answer that question I want to make one quick change real quick and then I want you to answer that for me. [adjusting equipment] Too far. I can’t see. Okay, there we go. So what happened there?
Mr. Skinner: I came through at Michigan State and they said, “Sign up and enlist in the Reserve and stay in college.” Well, I stayed in college for three months and then I got my notice to report to active duty. I went to Chicago and then from there, I went to Sheppard Field, Texas, and there I saw this sign that said, “Sign up for additional education.” So all of us beat the path to do that and we hung around in Sheppard Field, Texas for – I don’t know – it seemed like forever. Suddenly we shipped out and ultimately I got in at LSU.
Mr. McDaniel: At LSU. What were they doing at LSU? Was that like a special training program?
Mr. Skinner: It’s regular engineering and some of the people were in mechanical engineering and some were electrical. Some of the people who had signed up for civil engineering never got there.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Skinner: They went directly to active duty. The mechanical engineers didn’t exist very long. They hauled them off to active duty. So chemical and electrical stayed there at LSU and I was there, as I say, about nine months. Then they moved me to Washington University, St. Louis, and I spent three months in the advanced – call it ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program]. Then here.
Mr. McDaniel: Did they – do you have a sense that they knew where they were going to send you? Did you have a sense that they knew what they wanted to do with you?
Mr. Skinner: I don’t think I did. It was one of these things that you just go along and they say, “Do this and do that,” and you do it. Like when I got to Knoxville, I don’t even think I knew that I was in Knoxville. I was at the L&N Station and they put us in covered trucks and hauled us out. The first thing we saw, then, is the orderly room here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? So when you came to Oak Ridge, you were in the service.
Mr. Skinner: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: You were a member of the SED, Special Engineering Detachment.
Mr. Skinner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: But when you were in college in Michigan, were you studying engineering, chemical engineering?
Mr. Skinner: I was studying Chem. Engineering at Michigan State and then after – I need to back up. When I was at LSU, Chem. Engineering wasn’t available. So I flipped the coin and took Electrical. By the time I got through with the courses there in St. Louis, I had enough courses then to switch over to Electrical when I went back to Michigan State in 1948.
Mr. McDaniel: So after your service, you went back to school?
Mr. Skinner: Right. I went back for about two years, got my degree, and then came back doing exactly the same job I’d been doing in the Army.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you came to Oak Ridge in ’44.
Mr. Skinner: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s right. That’s when you arrived in Oak Ridge. You hadn’t finished your degree yet, but you had had all this specialized training in chemical engineering. So tell me about coming to Oak Ridge. You said you got on a covered truck from Knoxville to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Skinner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about that.
Mr. Skinner: Well it’s hard to sort of remember. That was a few years ago.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Sure.
Mr. Skinner: But I remember stopping along the way and obviously it was one of the gates. I don’t know whether it was Elza or Solway gate. Then we came on and unloaded here in Oak Ridge in the orderly room. I was assigned to a dormitory, a barracks type thing for a short time and then moved into one of the four person hutments that they had here. The four of us there were on shift work and we came and went.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did they keep the military, the SED, kind of grouped together?
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. They were all in one area. A few of them in a barracks type building and the rest of us in lots of these little hutments.
Mr. McDaniel: The hutments? Where was your hutment? Was it in Midtown area?
Mr. Skinner: Well it’s about where the shopping center is now.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, that midtown area?
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. They were row on row and they had a separate room for showers and bath and wooden sidewalks connecting all of them, like all of Oak Ridge had.
Mr. McDaniel: So the hutment community, they didn’t have the plumbing in them, did they? I mean, they didn’t have showers and baths in the hutment. It was kind of like a campground, where you had a central shower and bath building.
Mr. Skinner: That’s right. We had an oil burner, a kerosene burning stove in the middle of the hut which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. You got up in the morning and you went to work and came back and sacked out or went to the PX or played cards or whatever you wanted to do.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you first came to Oak Ridge and you were in the SED, where did you go to work?
Mr. Skinner: I went to work for Y-12. I was assigned to an electrical crew in Beta-1, 9204-1, with another GI.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do?
Mr. Skinner: We did the maintenance work on all the electrical equipment associated with the separators. There are umpteen different voltages that are involved. So all the equipment is in cubicle form. That’s why we call it cubicle. It was our job to keep those things running. If you needed a new tube we’d put a new tube in or something, whatever, and get it back running as quickly as possible.
Mr. McDaniel: Now did you say you were in Beta-1?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were in Beta-1. That building’s no longer there anymore, is it?
Mr. Skinner: The building’s there but the –
Mr. McDaniel: The contents are gone.
Mr. Skinner: All the contents are out and it’s used for many other things.
Mr. McDaniel: Was it similar to – I’ve been in Beta-3, so I imagine it’s –
Mr. Skinner: They are identical as far as I can tell.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So there was a lot of electrical being done with those systems, weren’t there?
Mr. Skinner: Oh yeah I mean because that’s the whole thing. You’ve got to ionize a gas and you’ve got to accelerate the ions and it’s –
Mr. McDaniel: By my count, if you had – did you have two racetracks in each building?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So by my count that would be seventy-two different cubicles and calutrons, and neutrons.
Mr. Skinner: That’s right. They were set up in a control room oriented just like the units were out on the track.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly. What was the biggest – I mean obviously they were just running all the time and just going and going and going, so I guess there was a lot of maintenance to do, electrical maintenance.
Mr. Skinner: Oh yeah. I mean probably the largest part is a replacement of the tubes and the rectifier systems. The high voltage system, you see, was 45,000 to 55,000 volts DC, and those tubes, if you’ve seen them, are about three feet high.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly.
Mr. Skinner: They were quite a job to replace.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure.
Mr. Skinner: Others were smaller tubes but when they hollered that they were down, why, we were there to find out why and get it back again.
Mr. McDaniel: Just a quick question: have you been in the basement of Beta-3 in the last few years?
Mr. Skinner: I took that tour they took of Beta-3 about three years ago. I don’t know whether we got in the basement or not on that tour.
Mr. McDaniel: See, about five or six years ago, I went in and shot some video in Beta-3. I think I was the first non-classified person ever to shoot video. I went downstairs to the basement. They still have some of those tubes packed in packing material that says, “Shipped” – printed on the side of the package is “Clinton Engineer Works, February 1943.” But those were big tubes, tall tubes.
Mr. Skinner: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So could you do that by yourself or was that two-man job?
Mr. Skinner: Well there were two on the crew – we usually worked together. Some things you did, you know, one person could handle.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you did that. How long did you do that job?
Mr. Skinner: So early in ’46, as I recall, January, and they knew that the Army people were soon going to be discharged from the Army. They took us off active work like that and put us over getting the Alpha buildings in so-called standby.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, because they were shutting everything down.
Mr. Skinner: Which involved mainly painting conduit and all sorts of things it seemed at the time were silly, but we had a job.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So I imagine because of the work that you were doing over there, that you probably – you knew what was going on. Or did you?
Mr. Skinner: I didn’t know. Didn’t know.
Mr. McDaniel: Really? Didn’t know what those things were doing, huhn?
Mr. Skinner: I think the first time that we were – our particular group was informed was after the test bomb.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Skinner: Even though that was not uranium, I always thought it was. But I think it was then that our supervisors called us over and said, “Here’s what you guys here were doing.”
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about – and we’ll go back – I want to go back a little bit – but tell me about – were you in Oak Ridge when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima?
Mr. Skinner: I must have been. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: You must have been. Do you remember anything about that?
Mr. Skinner: Well just all the excitement, crowds and things like that.
Mr. McDaniel: So what was it like? I imagine you were single then when you were here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Skinner: Yep, I was single.
Mr. McDaniel: Some people said they had lots of activities to choose from and then some people told me, “Man, we just worked all the time.”
Mr. Skinner: Well when you’re working on shift work, the rotating shift, you just – the only time really you had too much is if you were on day shift or they had the evening. Dancing and a lot of people played poker and bridge. I had – one of my friends was quite a gambler, and he made himself a fair amount of money. He was pretty lucky at it or good at it. I don’t know which. He just did –
Mr. McDaniel: Right. You just found ways to spend your time. Did you – I know they had lots of sports teams and things such as that.
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. I played on a basketball team and we were called the Little Stinkers because we never could win a game.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] That’s funny. That is funny. Okay, so you left. You went back. You were discharged from the Army in, what did you say, ’46?
Mr. Skinner: ’46.
Mr. McDaniel: And you went back to Michigan.
Mr. Skinner: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: Michigan State, and you finished your bachelors. Is that right?
Mr. Skinner: And my masters.
Mr. McDaniel: And your masters there.
Mr. Skinner: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me what happened then.
Mr. Skinner: Well before I was discharged and right after they had put us on this standby crew, I heard that there was an opening over in the Isotope group which ultimately was the Stable Isotope group. A couple of us GIs went over and saw Chris Keim and said, “We’d like to work. We don’t like this other job.” So he gave us a job. Of course that made the military kind of unhappy that we went around them, but at that time it didn’t make any difference. So I had worked there in 9731 from about February until June. Then in June is when I left and went back to Michigan and got married and went back to school. When I came back, why, the best job I could get was coming back to work in 9731 again doing exactly the same things I had been doing.
Mr. McDaniel: What were you doing in 9731?
Mr. Skinner: Doing the design and building of the separators for each of the stable isotopes. Every element required a slightly different format, structure.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me ask you a question, because I don’t know this. Now, to separate those, did they use the calutrons for that separation?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So basically they used the calutrons but you had to kind of adjust things according to the specific element?
Mr. Skinner: That’s right because of the different weight and the different physical characteristic of them. When we did, for example, mercury, mercury vaporizes very easily. So we used dry ice to keep it cold. The transfer agent was ethyl alcohol and you can imagine what happened when they ordered thirty-five gallons of alcohol at Christmas time.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] I’m sure.
Mr. Skinner: But they got it. They got it. But that’s just one of the illustrations of how different things had to be designed for the different elements that were being processed.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did you stay with the stable isotope program for a while?
Mr. Skinner: I stayed until the end of – what was it – the end of 1950. They were having a budget crunch and Chris Keim came – called me in on a Monday morning. He said, “We have budget problems. We’ve made up two lists: a list of those people we cannot do without and you’re on the other list unfortunately. But we’ve got” –
Mr. McDaniel: Well, you were still young then, weren’t you, just starting out.
Mr. Skinner: Yeah, sure. But they said, “We’ve got an interview for you this afternoon.” So I interviewed to work in the Law Department doing patent work.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right? That’s right.
Mr. Skinner: I hardly knew how to spell the word ‘patent,’ but they hired me anyway. I switched over doing that work for the rest of the time I worked in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? So from 1950 until –
Mr. Skinner: Till the end of 1980.
Mr. McDaniel: Until the end of 1980, you did patent work.
Mr. Skinner: I did patent work in the Law Department.
Mr. McDaniel: Was that for the whole Oak Ridge site or was it just for –
Mr. Skinner: I was assigned do to it for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had an office in each of the plants and I was at the ORNL Patent Office.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me a little bit about that work. You did it for thirty years and I’ll bet you saw all kinds of things. I guess it’s – the stories are famous for people who worked there. They’ll get a patent and get paid a dollar or something like that. So tell me about how all that worked.
Mr. Skinner: Well, my job was to find the new things that the scientists were doing that might be subject matter for patent work. I wrote what we called an Invention Disclosure. That went to the AEC, at that time, who evaluated and decided whether they did want or did not want to file a patent application. If they did, then I was the liaison between the inventor and the attorneys on the government side to do that. So it was a process of educating scientists who don’t want to be bothered with much of control and getting them educated, reading reports, looking to see if new things were being talked about. In fact, I had to read everything that was being published before it could go out.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Skinner: That got to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure.
Mr. Skinner: Finally I said, “I’ve had enough of that.” I’d had enough years of service. So I said, “I’m leaving,” so I did.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me see here. I have a couple of questions about that, but first, I guess you had – just off the top of my head, you would think that someone with a legal background would be a person that would be required for that position or was it somebody with a –
Mr. Skinner: No, it was really – to be a good patent person, you need to be a good technical person, because you have to understand and you have to try to extend the thoughts of the inventor to get patent coverage on things.
Mr. McDaniel: I see. So you needed to be kind of almost an advocate for the inventor as far as the technical aspect of it?
Mr. Skinner: Very much so.
Mr. McDaniel: So that – then obviously your technical expertise would have been required for that. What are some of the – are there any of the things that stand out in your mind that you worked on over those thirty years?
Mr. Skinner: Oh, that’s – you caught me off balance here. Well, one of them that became internationally known was a neutron dosimeter invented by Sam Hurst and it was called the Hurst Dosimeter. There was that that we got a patent on and a couple of the organic separation processes for recovering uranium and plutonium. Those are the ones that come to mind immediately.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But I’m sure there were probably hundreds of them that you did over the years.
Mr. Skinner: There were. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: For us lay people we’d probably think, “Well I don’t even understand what that means,” but for the scientific technical community, it may have been the biggest thing since sliced bread, couldn’t it? [laughter]
Mr. Skinner: Yeah. Some of the things in the metallurgical field, some of the new alloys that were developed that are now in use commercially: your ink alloys and some of the highly corrosive resistant –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you covered, really, all of the Lab, everything. All the biology, everything.
Mr. Skinner: Everything that was being done by people working for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you ever work with the Russells, Lee Russell?
Mr. Skinner: I didn’t because I guess there was never a thought of inventive concepts in their research. I know who they are, but I never had any contact with them.
Mr. McDaniel: So you did that until you retired in 1980. Is that correct?
Mr. Skinner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: We’re going to go back here and I’m going to talk about some things, but tell me, since you retired, what have you been doing?
Mr. Skinner: Well, I didn’t like retirement. In fact my wife said I flunked it. Among other things I didn’t know what day of the week it was, because you talk about the Monday-Friday syndrome, well, it really exists. On Friday you’re working to get through things, finished for the week, and on Monday you’re starting new things. But anyway, I had a chance to go to work for a firm in Knoxville to do patent work and so I took that job in – I guess it was probably March of April of 1980 and I continued working for them as an independent contractor till about 2005, I guess, or 2006 –
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Skinner: – doing patent work, writing patent applications. I did the patent applications on the first commercially useful pet sensor. They’re used in everything nowadays. I did the patent work on the 360 degree photography, the IPIX Technology, and lots of other things between. Pocket knives, fishing lures, meat processing equipment, just anything that came in the door.
Mr. McDaniel: So you did work in post-retirement almost as long as you did when you were working here.
Mr. Skinner: Yeah, I did.
Mr. McDaniel: So you’ve done patent work for fifty-five – you did it for fifty-five years, didn’t you?
Mr. Skinner: Very close to it.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. So let’s go back to Oak Ridge. When you came back after you got your Master’s degree, you were married at the time. Is that correct?
Mr. Skinner: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about bringing your wife. Did you have family by then?
Mr. Skinner: No.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you live and what kind of house did you get?
Mr. Skinner: One of the dormitory buildings out near Louisiana Avenue had been converted into sort of apartments. They had – so we got that and I got on the list for regular housing. I can’t remember how long we were there. It seems like two, three months, maybe longer. Then we got a house, a “B” house up at the top of California Avenue, the last house on California Avenue. We started raising a family. Our daughter was born when we were there and our oldest son was born while we were living in that house. About the time he was born, the house was so small, we didn’t want it. At that time they were offering the houses, the rental houses for sale and we didn’t want the house we were in. So we began to look around the communities and we ended up going to Kingston. My boss lived in Kingston. So he I guess was influential in getting me to go that way. So we moved to Roane County in ’52, I believe, 1952.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you move to the house that you’re still in?
Mr. Skinner: No. We moved on Nelson Drive on the lake; we had a house built for us. We lived in that house thirty-nine years and then we –
Mr. McDaniel: Was that out in Green Acres?
Mr. Skinner: No. It’s right in behind Mama Mia’s.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, that’s right.
Mr. Skinner: Now we’re out in West Shores in the midtown area on the lake. We’ve been in that house for I guess nineteen years now.
Mr. McDaniel: But you liked Kingston, huhn?
Mr. Skinner: We love the area very much.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So when you were in Oak Ridge or in Kingston what were some of the – when you were working at the plant, I guess, at the Lab, what were some of the extracurricular activities? Were you in civic groups or –
Mr. Skinner: Well I guess it was in ’53 or ’54 I joined the Lions Club in Kingston and I’ve been a member of the Kingston Lions Club ever since. I’ve always been active in my church, St. Stevens, in Oak Ridge, the men’s work there. Then in 1983, I guess it was, I helped form the Tennessee Inventors Association and it still exists and [is] active today. Those were the three principle things that I’ve been involved in.
Mr. McDaniel: Over your years at the Lab – of course, they’ve done all kinds of different things, I guess. What are some of the biggest changes you saw in maybe the kind of work that was going on there, because you really – you came and you did your job during the war here. You were in the Army and you came and did your job and helped Oak Ridge achieve its goal. Then you came back and really started your career after that. What were some of the big changes, some of the big things that you saw over the years?
Mr. Skinner: Well, I guess it was increase in management levels. When I first was over at the Lab, even people who were listed as department heads were active scientists and over the years it got more and more where – I shouldn’t call them figureheads – but became not active scientists.
Mr. McDaniel: They were managers.
Mr. Skinner: Managers. The more you have, the more complicated it gets and the slower things seemingly progress. I guess that’s my feeling. I’m sure that happens everywhere, but with a lab beginning from essentially nothing, it went through that phase. Mr. McDaniel: I bet the separating the stable isotopes was an exciting project.
Mr. Skinner: It was.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about that a little bit. For people that don’t understand what that would mean, explain that to us.
Mr. Skinner: There’s some fifty elements that have isotopes which is a same material but has different atomic weight.
Mr. McDaniel: Just like uranium does, U-238 and U-235.
Mr. Skinner: Right. That’s why we can separate them in the calutrons just like uranium. But they were doing some of these to use as tracers. Some of them, they irradiated to make radioactive substances that went into the medical field for – one that took us about over a year to develop, we enriched a sample of uranium-236 which doesn’t naturally occur at all. It exists after a material has been in the reactor. They asked us to make separation and concentrate some of that. It started off at less than one percent and we got it above twenty percent. But I think the quantity of the sample we had to begin with was – what was it? A few ounces – four ounces I think.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Skinner: An awful small amount for – so that we could get it all back as much as we could, we designed a half-scale calutron, twelve inch radius. Again, when you’ve changed everything like that, why, it changed all the other parameters. So you’d build it this way and it wouldn’t work and you’d build it again and you’d tear it down and the process lasted probably over a year. I guess that was maybe the most exciting of the processes that I worked on.
Mr. McDaniel: But the separation of the stable isotopes was really – I mean it did lots of things for science, but one of the main things it did was it was really the birthplace of nuclear medicine.
Mr. Skinner: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: Those isotopes were used in medicine, were beginning to be used in medicine weren’t they?
Mr. Skinner: You see, that building, which was the pilot plant for uranium, also became the pilot plant for isotope separation, a natural extension of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. You eventually separated all the elements. Is that correct?
Mr. Skinner: All that had an isotope, yeah. I think there are fifty-some. Some of them for a practical end use. Others just to say that you’d done it, so to speak.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. But I would imagine that that would have been an exciting – kind of knowing what you’re doing, it was really kind of on the forefront of science. I mean, it really was.
Mr. Skinner: There have been people who say that the stable isotope separation is probably on top of the list of value of the atomic field.
Mr. McDaniel: Well that’s like when I interviewed Alvin Weinberg before he passed away, I asked him, I said, “What’s the most important thing that you were ever part of?” And he says, “I think the most important thing we ever did at Oak Ridge was the nuclear medicine, was being able to separate those isotopes for nuclear medicine.”
Mr. Skinner: We were the only ones doing it. Subsequently, I believe, it seemed like the Russians undertook it.
Mr. McDaniel: The Russians undertook it and by that time it was becoming commercialized. So it really became a matter of supply and demand and cost, from my understanding. The Russians ended up being able to do it a whole lot cheaper than we could.
Mr. Skinner: I was out of that work by the time that that occurred, so I really don’t know much of the proceedings.
Mr. McDaniel: I talked with Scott Aaron about that and he was able to talk a little bit about that. What else do you want to talk about? Anything else you want to mention?
Mr. Skinner: Well, I may be repeating myself, but they talk about the whole project being the Manhattan Project. I consider the work in Y-12 the Miracle Project.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Skinner: Because they took just a few tests and I think it was a thirty-seven inch cyclotron, and from that built the units for 9731 and then ten process plants. That really took guts to – faith, I guess, is a better word. The way it came about, I think, is a real miracle.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Looking back on it now, how do you feel – I try to ask this to folks who worked during the project. I get varying answers. How do you feel about working here during the war and finding what the end product was?
Mr. Skinner: I’m proud as heck. I’ve talked to so many people who were on their way toward Japan and they say the bomb saved their life. They had been told that they likely would not come back. I’ve got a brother-in-law that bumped into all sorts of people. They were going through the Panama Canal or going halfway across the Pacific and turned around and came back home. There have been some people – I think there were some scientists who were maybe not convinced that we had to use it. I thoroughly am convinced they had to use it, and I’m happy that it worked out.
Mr. McDaniel: Well good. Is there anything else you want to talk about?
Mr. Skinner: Well I don’t know. I think we covered lots of things.
Mr. McDaniel: You got any good, funny stories?
Mr. Skinner: I’m not much of a –
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
[end of recording]